Forever—a terrifying idea in many regards. It’s not proper to earthly creatures.
I felt a kindred experience in Isabel Allende while writing here in the United States but thinking about Venezuela and dealing with all these feelings about being apart from it . . . guilt, love, nostalgia for my home country that I knew I probably was never going to live in again.
In history there are clear patterns that we actively choose to look away from, rather than engage. Our relationship with technology is one. [It has] a particular rhythm: one step forward, one step back. A help. A harm.
If there is something quintessentially modern it’s the idea that we are the authors of our own minds, the authors of our own reality. And what we create . . . is exciting precisely because it springs out of us and does not conform to something that is already there. The idea of novelty is a novelty.
For around thirty-five years, the condition of my skin is something I have thought about and dealt with almost every day, so it inevitably has affected my perception of myself and likely how others see me, too.
How much weirdness is acceptable and what becomes gross or nauseating? What is the limit? I find it interesting for the body too. . . What’s the limit of grossing out a reader and having someone stay with a story?
Our sense of genre has evolved so intensely that you can use them quite quickly to bring in other ideas or ideas that we might not expect from a detective story or an action scene. That disjuncture or that conflict can be interesting and comical.
Whenever I’m beginning something new . . . I’m always looking for a constraint of some kind. Some kind of blueprint inside the work that tells me how it works.
The idea that I would have to be silent about an experience that I had because it would make other people feel uncomfortable . . . just felt obscene at a certain point.
I thought to myself, I haven’t gotten better. I still have OCD. There’s no answer; there’s no resolution. The book is just going to be “this is my brain, this is what happens in my brain, the end.”